>> no purpose to a completely overlapping category unless it is intended to
>> relate to an earlier standard (say Haskell 1.4).
I believe all Haskell Reports, even since 1.0, have specified that the language
"uses" Unicode. If it helps to bring perspective to this discussion, it is my
impression that the initial designers of Haskell did not know very much about
Unicode, but wanted to avoid the trap of being stuck with ASCII-only, and so
decided to reference "whatever Unicode does", as the most obvious and
unambiguous way of not having to think about (or specify) these lexical issues
themselves.
> One of the underlying questions is: what is the concrete syntax of a
> Unicode character in a Haskell program? Note that Chapter 2 goes to a great
> pain to
> specify the ASCII concrete syntax.
In my view, the Haskell Report is deliberately agnostic on concrete syntax for
Unicode, believing that to be outside the scope of a programming language
standard, whilst entirely within the scope of the Unicode standards body.
Seeing as there are (in practice) numerous concrete representations of Unicode
(UTF-8 and other encodings), it is largely up to individual compiler
implementations which encodings they support for (a) source text, and (b)
input/output at runtime.
Regards,
Malcolm
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